get him to understand that I was all right, even if he hadn’t had my face pressed against his shoulder so I couldn’t talk clear. He ran up on the porch and went into the bedroom, and put me down on the bed.
“Here,” he says, all excited, pulling up my pants leg. “Let me see where it was! Doggone that dawg! I knowed all the time you couldn’t trust him.”
“Pop,” I says, “for the love of Pete, I been trying to tell you. He didn’t bite me. He didn’t even try. He was just playing.”
He stared at me with his mouth open. “Oh,” he says. He took out his handkerchief then and mopped his face. “Whew! Sure give me a scare, anyway. You’re sure you’re all right!”
“Of course,” I says. I got up off the bed.
“I could have swore he nipped at you,” Pop says, like he still could believe it.
“We better get back,” I says. “The sheriff wants me to go with him to start the dogs on the trail.”
“Sure,” he says. “They’re gone now to see if they can find something of hers for the scent.”
“That was what I was going to tell him, when you grabbed me,” I says. “Uncle Sagamore had some of her clothes.”
“Oh,” Pop says. He frowned kind of thoughtful. “I don’t know whether I’d tell him that or not. Course, I suppose it’d be all right—No, I expect we’d better not.”
“Well?” I asked. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Well,” he says, “she’s lost, you see, and Dr Severance has been shot, so in a way everything in that trailer has been impounded by the Gov’ment and nobody’s supposed to touch anything until the estate has been settled. It’s kind of legal stuff you wouldn’t understand very well. Of course, it’s all right for the shurf to go in there, but not us. Uncle Sagamore put the stuff back, of course, when he didn’t find her, but it might be a good idea not to say anything about it.”
“Oh,” I says. “Well, I won’t mention it.”
We went back out. Uncle Sagamore and the sheriff had come down close to the front yard and was waiting. The smell from the tubs was pretty bad there, and the sheriff was fanning the air with his hat. In a minute the other deputy came back. He had that pair of gold sandals of Miss Harrington’s—I mean Miss Caroline’s.
Me and the sheriff and the deputy started down below the lake with them holding on to the dogs’ leashes. When we got around on the lower side of it in the timber there was men everywhere, still looking.
“I don’t know how the hell a dawg could foller nothin’ in this trampled-up mess,” the sheriff says, real bitter. “Help! Hah! We’ll be the rest of the fall roundin’ up the lost hunters, after we locate her.”
We went on up through the woods until we was across from the place where we swum, and I showed the sheriff where we climbed out of the water while they was shooting at us. From there it was only a little way through the timber to the little gully with the ferns growing around it. For a wonder, there wasn’t anybody else around, and the ferns hadn’t been trampled on. You could still see the broken one where we had hid.
“You see?” I says. “Right there.”
“Good,” the sheriff says. “I’m glad somebody around this place is a decent, intelligent, common, ordinary, co-operatin’ human being. You’re all right, Billy.”
Being back here on the spot reminded me of how we’d listened to the other gangsters going by in the leaves while we was hid. I told the sheriff about it. “So there must have been three of them,” I said. “Maybe the other one’s still down there, or else he got away.”
He shook his head. “No. He didn’t get away. We found the car out there on the road last night and nabbed him when he showed up. So far he ain’t said a word, so we don’t know whether he got her or not, but the fact you say you heard him makes your story check out.”
“You—you reckon he shot her, Sheriff?” I asked.
He frowned, kind of thoughtful. “No. I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she’s still alive.”
“It sure looks like they’d have found her by this time,” I says.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t it?”
We went over to where the deputy was holding the dogs, and the sheriff let each one of them smell the pair of